He was talking away exactly as if he were moving a vote of thanks to the chairman of a board of guardians or a town council, or proposing a toast at an Oddfellows’ supper. He was in that state of orgasm which oratory of this type always produces in the lower middle-class Englishman.
This habit is ridiculous enough, even among its normal surroundings of stuffy rooms, half-cleared tables, and black-coated pork-butchers and pawnbrokers. But here, poised in the silence where sea and sky and desert met, where Nature seemed to have unveiled her immensity in a sacramental moment, Captain Welfare ceased to be absurd.
Edmund and I both felt him as something almost obscene—a sacrilege.
I managed to murmur, “Thank you,” when he finished, and I was indeed thankful for silence when it came.
But grateful as the silence was, it seemed necessary to say something, if only to prevent the discovery by Welfare that he had not the sympathy of his audience, and so the development among us of embarrassment and discomfort.
I asked him how long he thought it would be before we reached the landing-place.
“We’re close to it now,” he said, “not above thirty miles or so, but of course we’re at the mercy of the wind and the current.”
“The current?” I asked. “I thought there was practically no tide in the Mediterranean.”
“No, there’s no tide to speak of. But coastal currents? My word! You pick up a point ashore, and see how we’re drifting now.”
Distant as the coast was, I could see that we were indeed slipping slowly back on the way we had come.